We were granted access to understand just what mushrooms and their roots can do. Shiitake mushrooms have been known to boost immunity and lower cholesterol. White button mushrooms have antioxidants that can reduce risk of heart disease.
But it’s the lesser known specimens, strains like turkey tail, oyster and agarikon mushrooms that Stamets wants to study for ways they can, in his words, save the planet. Oyster mushrooms in particular are being tested for their ability to clean up oil spills. A strain Stamets helped develop is tolerant to salt water and can metabolize hydrocarbons. One trial showed that an oyster strain could reduce diesel contaminants from soil from 10,000 parts per million to just 200 ppm in about four months. The process isn’t an instant fix for a disaster, but it was shown to fully eliminate oil organically, without using the type of controversial chemical dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico after 2010’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Other mushrooms like the Mycena alcalina, better known as a stump fairy helmet mushroom, have the potential to break down PCBs, a cancer-causing agent once used in can manufacturing. Stamets explained how the mushroom, if given time to boost its own immune system, could be a defense against chemical weapons that could spread infectious diseases like smallpox.
“Here, smell this,” Stamets says, pushing a handful of bunched up mycelium toward my nose. It resembled cole slaw but it smelled like earth—rich, living, slightly pungent Earth that I can’t help but inhale one more time. “Isn’t it amazing, ahh, I could smell this all day.”
Despite more than four decades studying mushrooms, Stamets is a man who seems to genuinely enjoy preaching about their qualities. He even goes to Burning Man, the desert festival in Northern Nevada, every year to talk about them.
Being an expert in such a small field has its serious benefits, too. In one room Stamets showed us several jars of liquid extracts of mushrooms, potent elixirs that contained advanced strains of some mycelia. “Pharmaceutical companies want this stuff baaaadly,” he told us. A week before our visit, in fact, a company he declined to identify called and asked him to name his price in exchange for some of his most hard-to-find strains that have potential for new drugs.
He’d rather uncover the future secrets of mushrooms on his own. He told them no thanks.
